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Re: Advice for a new budding recordist.

Subject: Re: Advice for a new budding recordist.
From: Walter Knapp <>
Date: Sun, 15 Dec 2002 20:59:45 -0500
Klas Strandberg wrote:
> I usually favour Sharp MD's:
> 
> First you can change the recording level while recording, without pausing,
> secondly you don't have to press "search end" to get a new recording after
> all others.
> 
> Are my comments still relevant, Walt? Or has Sony changed? New advantages
> with Sony??

At least one of the newest Sony MD's does this now, can't remember which 
one. But all the rest you have to set gain level while in record pause. 
And there is a end search that you press. Not any kind of problem for me 
with the MZ-R30's. End search just gets to be part of your routine. It 
would remember where I was between sessions, so if I was moving from 
site to site recording it would come on already at the end unless I'd 
gone back to check a recording. In spite of that I always did end search.

I'm sure it was done to make a MD behave a little more cassette like, 
but I think it's dumb to make it default to overwrite. No one complained 
much about cassettes doing this, except for the time it took to wind the 
tape to the right spot.

The MZ-R30's and quite a few others had a poorly documented feature that 
helped. If you just went into record or record/pause quickly it would 
turn on it's auto levels. But you could get directly into manual record 
by simply holding the buttons a few seconds when you started into 
record/pause. If I remember right it was 4 seconds for the MZ-R30.

As I've stated, if you expect to be doing any filtering or sound 
processing afterward, then riding the gain is going to make it tough to 
do a good job. You are much better off making full use of the wide 
dynamic range of MD, and learning to judge how much headroom to leave. 
It does not take long to learn.

Sharps have disadvantages too. Over the years nearly every time I heard 
of a TOC failure it was a Sharp. And in other ways the Sharps don't seem 
as durable.

Also, Sharp generally waited for Sony to come out with ATRAC 
improvements, then imitated them. So often models of the same time 
period the Sharp will have a older style ATRAC. Sharp does not use 
Sony's ATRAC encoder, they write their own. It's really pretty unknown 
as most tests of ATRAC test some Sony encoder. Sharp's ATRAC has not 
been critically tested much and I'd not assume it was exactly the same 
as Sony's.

I have adjustable gain during record with the Portadisc. And from time 
to time have used it. And later regretted it when processing. If I use 
it I try to make a discrete jump, so I can find it later.

BTW, the same thing arises with automatic gain. Hard to process, 
probably harder than manual gain riding.

The Portadisc also has a choice if it overwrites or not, what you are 
avoiding with end search. Naturally I keep it set to never overwrite.

Walt




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